ICQ messenger shuts down after almost 28 years

0nekoneko7@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 439 points – ICQ messenger shuts down after almost 28 years
bleepingcomputer.com
69

Yahoo! Messenger shut down in 2018
MSN Messenger discontinued in 2013
AIM Messenger discontinued in 2017

ICQ was really the last of them and it's ending quite an era. This is, officially, the end of the Messengers.

Damn, thinking about the msn messenger brings me back to such simpler and happier times

I can almost breath the same as young me getting home, throwing my bag in my bed and jumping to the family PC in the living room to chat with friends. Man, I never thought I'd miss the 00's. Why'd I wanna grow up?

WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Signal, etc. It's hardly the end, the market has just been gobbled up by the big players as usual

One thing those old ones did was have conversations in their own windows. I much prefer that over having to navigate back and forth in the same damn window to jump between convos.

Man and with the way they’re built today, there’s probably no hotkey that e.g. Alfred or Keyboard Maestro could help you press to navigate between conversations. Though I wouldn’t be surprised to find I’m wrong and that somebody’s figured out workarounds.

Msn was the best, I'll never forgive Microsoft for killing it in favour of Skype.

I must have used all of them over the years. Can't remember why, they were all pretty much the same.

OG instant messenger 🫡 survived long enough.

Damn, it was still running? Not that I still remember my username or password, but damn...

I'm not sure if it ever changed but usernames used to be numbers.

Mine started with a 3 and was 8 digits long

I can still hear that uh oh

Damn i still say that like that sometimes, and i totally forgot where it came from

Here is an alternative Piped link(s):

uh oh

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

the weirdest location I ever heard that sound was a random small supermarket that had that sound as the scan-bleep-sound of the register barcode scanner.

Every item that was getting pulled over it, went "uh oh"

If I'd work there I'd probably get fired for destroying that.

yup. it was already quite hard to stay calm during the short time I had to queue

That typewriter sound effect for every key you hit was so satisfying

I remember when they first introduced the live chat feature.

You could literally watch the other person type something out, erase their mistakes and correct it in real time.

That shit blew my mind as a kid.

RIP one of the most enjoyable messengers I ever used 🫡

I really liked the design of the underlying protocol (OSCAR, also used by AIM). It was a lot of fun to implement in a 3rd party client and I learned so much about networking and application protocols from the experience. It contributed immensely my career path.

It was my first introduction to the type-length-value concept over the network, seemed radically different from the text only IRC protocol that I knew back then. I remember how fun it was to write an elegant parser for the ICQ messaging, and how I ended up on somewhat a DOM model where I converted the on-wire format into series of nested objects. Not the most efficient idea, but it was neat.

RIP ICQ, you were a real one

My icq# was 4706179 and I doubt I'll ever forget it.

1132418 here!

Someone with a lower UIN than mine, 1803929. Guess I should have created my account when I found out about it a year earlier. :)

31299966 man, I didn’t realize it was still running. The live text chat was the best.

11909704 it's been probably 25 to 30 years since I've used it, and still remember

1 more...

Nooooooo. I can't remember my ICQ, maybe I still have it somewhere, but this is still sad.

At least IRC is still going.

Edit:

In its heyday, ICQ boasted over 100 million users on its platform, which was a remarkable achievement at the time. In 2010, ICQ was purchased by Mail.ru (now VK), who has since owned the products as it declined in use.

Today, ICQ announced that they are shutting down on June 26th, recommending that users switch to VK Messenger and Workspace.

So apparently Russian business killed it.

Considering how many other messengers died before ICQ I would say Russian VK kept it alive...

The king has died, long live the shit we have now?

Out of everything we have today, Discord is arguably the best we've got.

Nobody cares about Skype anymore as much. VK Messenger, which is ICQ's successor, looks like trash. Telegram used to be very great but did take some morally questionable steps, yet still gives the user an awful lot of power. Zoom is garbage. Microsoft Teams is garbage. Facebook Messenger is garbage.

So if I had to pick, Discord and Telegram is the best we've got now.

IRC? Matrix? XMPP?

These three are still the best bet.

I made the observation last week at work. As my teams starts to move from Slack to (ahem) Teams, it’s worth noting that the internal IRC still works.

Out of everything we have today, Discord is arguably the best we've got.

That's amazingly depressing.

  1. About a decade ago I tried so hard to sign in but couldn’t guess my password and didn’t have access to my original email. Nothing is permanent…

Back in like 2006, I’ve made an account for myself. A bot added me, asked how big my dick is, and then I’ve never used it again

It’s been part of VKontakte since 2010. Good riddance I guess.

Loved it back in the day.

I assume today it is more a compete OS with games, browser, officer suite, video editing, ... than just a messenger? It sure would be if I extrapolate my experience from back in the day.

Nah, the latest iteration was a Telegram clone